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Dukakis and the Tank

Matt Bennett can still hear the reporters laughing, all 90 of them. He can still picture Sam Donaldson doubled over, guffawing, on a riser that looked out over a dusty field in suburban Detroit. Bennett was a 23-year-old political rookie in 1988 when he was sent to a General Dynamics facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., to organize a campaign stop for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis: a ride in a 68-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. The visit, meant to bolster the candidate’s credibility as a future commander-in-chief, would go down as one of the worst campaign backfires in history.

Following the event, after the reporters’ laughter subsided and Dukakis’s entourage was preparing to leave, one of the candidate’s traveling aides approached Bennett. “Nice event, Matt” he deadpanned. “It may have cost us the election. But beside that, it was great.”

* * *

Dukakis and the tank. The image of the diminutive Massachusetts governor pretending to be something he wasn’t and, in the process, making a fool of himself on Sept. 13, 1988, has haunted me, as it has every other advance person who has been entrusted—for a few hours or even a few minutes—with a candidate’s fate.

Like Bennett, I too worked on the Dukakis campaign, and we went on to serve together in the Clinton White House. I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the president’s schedule had the makings of a “Dukakis in the tank moment.” The caution usually came when some type of costume was involved, and the tank ride is still to this day invoked anytime politicians decline to put hats on their heads—as President Obama did earlier this year when he was handed a Navy football helmet but refused to try it on. (“You don’t put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he said. “That’s politics 101.”) But the story of the disastrous tank ride also endures as an example of the broader laws of unintended consequences in political stagecraft.

And that, to me, has always been the most fascinating part of this disaster story, a mystery to be solved: Why had an event that everyone now agrees was such a terrible idea ever happened in the first place?

Twenty-five years after the notorious disaster, I set out this summer—with help from Steve Silverman, a fellow advance man from 1988 and a longtime Clinton colleague—to discover what had set the infamous tank ride in motion and why no one had put a stop to it. In more than 20 lengthy interviews, I found a story that surprised me: The truth is, many of Dukakis’s advisers did try to forestall the tank ride even while others were convinced the photo op was essential. They argued with each other over it, sent warnings back to headquarters, huddled in anxious meetings and even dispatched an expert fixer, all to no avail. That some tried to stop it but couldn’t is, in its own way, a very human story about simple inertia, the difficulty of changing course once a plan is set in motion. But it’s a story about accountability, too—a failure of leadership that led a candidate who was busy proclaiming his technocratic “competence” to run a myopic and incompetent campaign.

WATCH: The Making of a Political Disaster.

To unravel the tale, I started with Bennett, an old friend from the Clinton years. He shared with me his quarter-century-old journal entry about the tank debacle, six typewritten pages printed out in the old dot-matrix style.

Bennett’s diary made for an excellent start. But I also wanted to talk to others who were there, including Dukakis’s hosts at General Dynamics Land Systems, the campaign aides flying on the Dukakis plane and the governor’s foreign-policy advisers, James Steinberg and Madeleine Albright, both of whom were in Sterling Heights that day and had helped shape the campaign's message behind the tank ride.

Members of the headquarters staff told me what it was like to plan the trip from Boston, and about the queasy feeling they had watching the tank ride unfold on television. In Washington, the Bush-Quayle team was watching, too. Deputy campaign manager Rich Bond recalls that the tank was “a huge gift” whose impact was clear on the morning of Sept. 14 as his team reviewed news clips from the evening before and studied photos from that day’s papers.

The Republicans I tracked down were happy to chat; the Democrats less so. Several did not want to be quoted. Others sparred over perhaps the most pivotal detail: just how that idiotic-looking tank-commander’s helmet ended up atop the candidate’s head.

Victory, as they say, has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

* * *

Matt Bennett

Bennett arrived in Sterling Heights, in the center of Michigan’s Macomb County—a Detroit suburb rich in Reagan Democrats that Dukakis needed to court—on Thursday, Sept. 8. He had gotten his orders from Katie Whelan, his scheduler at headquarters: Orchestrate a tank ride for the governor, to be followed by a speech. At the time, it seemed logical enough.

Katie Whelan

Dukakis had prevailed in the fight for the Democratic nomination that year, touting a business renaissance in the Bay State, the so-called “Massachusetts Miracle,” and his personal story of a Greek immigrant family’s embrace of the American Dream. If only he had used his biography to greater advantage during the general election. Instead, he fixed his message on competence and left himself vulnerable to a fusillade of attacks from Vice President George H.W. Bush’s team that ushered in a new era of political combat. One target was Dukakis’s policies on national defense. Although future events would prove him prescient, Dukakis had positioned himself too far ahead of the Cold War’s end. He argued that President Ronald Reagan had spent too much on the country’s nuclear arsenal and shortchanged conventional weaponry. The Abrams tank that Dukakis would ride in was the physical representation of that argument. At least that was the idea.

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Bennett checked into his hotel, met the other members of his team and introduced himself to his hosts at General Dynamics, the makers of the $4.3 million M1A1 tank.

Members of advance teams are slated into specific roles: lead, press, site, crowd, motorcade and hotel. In Sterling Heights, Paul Holtzman was the overall lead while Bennett was the site lead, essentially the event’s producer, responsible for the choreography and stagecraft of the visit.

Bennett believed the visit was a bad idea and tried to warn headquarters, but his initial concerns had little to do with presidential image-making. As an undergraduate, he’d written his senior thesis on the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

“I argued General Dynamics is the wrong company for the Democratic nominee for president to be in bed with,” he wrote in his journal. “Not surprisingly, I was told, in so many words, to shut up and do my job.”

LISTEN: Matt Bennett: "I was very nervous about this event from the beginning."

The decision to visit General Dynamics had been made by senior advisers far above Bennett’s pay grade, and it grew from a message developed much earlier in the campaign. While Dukakis was still cementing his lead in the Democratic primary, he made a stop at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Derry, N.H. It was two days before the first-in-the-nation primary in February and Dukakis gave a speech billed as “Renewing America's Strength: A Foreign Policy for the 1990's.” As Jim Steinberg told me, “The idea was to try to figure out an angle that would give him some credibility on national security and foreign policy.” The angle turned, in pragmatic Dukakis style, on arithmetic and cost savings. “A focal point of the argument,” Steinberg says, “was that he was against all these nuclear weapons because we didn’t need them and it was taking away money from conventional weapons that we did need.” Weapons like a tank, for example.